Come on, really? Did that really happen during the Bush years? I remember a lot of votes done under the cover of late-nights and early mornings in an effort to avoid specifically this very thing. Not that it would have made a difference anyway, Conservatives are party-before-country. Always. If they didn't listen to Democrats when they were warning against invading Iraq, why would they have listened to Democrats when it came to the housing bubble which is the only thing that propped up Bush's economy?
What did they want to "reign in"? Because GSE's weren't the ones responsible for the flood of subprimes. Those were done by non-GSE entities. It wasn't until Bush reversed Clinton's 2000 HUD rule that GSE's started buying risky subprimes. To "reign in" the industry, what should have happened was more regulation and oversight of the lending standards for subprimes. But Conservatives opposed that, choosing instead to allow the industry to self-police beginning in 2004 and saying regulation was "low priority". Didn't work out so well, did it?
It wasn't house-flippers that the mortgage bubble was designed for, nor were they who the bubble benefited. For that, you only need look at the profits banks made off the sales of subprime-backed securities in the secondary mortgage market. That's where the profit was. These lenders knew the subprimes were garbage, even saying so in e-mails.
Well, I think there's some context in that video you're missing. Frank's talking only about one group in that video, not the industry as a whole. And besides, he's right. Using the housing bubble to increase house-flipping was inevitably going to lead to a collapse.
